


Choose Your Own Rainbow

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Hospitals, Humor, M/M, Yoga
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 16:30:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6122530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Edward Elric has the most singular talent of anyone alive for taking Roy's zen, thrashing it thoroughly, and then hurling it into a Dumpster. …metaphysically speaking, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choose Your Own Rainbow

**Author's Note:**

> A now extremely late birthday present for [Obersten](http://obersten.tumblr.com/)!!!!! ♥ Based on his ridiculously A+ [Downward Dogs AU](http://obersten.tumblr.com/tagged/downward-dogs-au) – the premise is founded in some intel I acquired from Secret Insider Sources (thank you, Secret Insider Sources!! ♥), and then I made up everything else. :'D tl;dr if you like a detail/aspect of this, it's probably Berg's; if you're like "wtf is this shit," it's probably one of my additions. X'D (Or it's one of the things I half-assedly pretended to research! I am a pro at this writing shit.)

Today Roy is going to tell Ed how stupid it is to hate on chakra beads.  The trick to arguing with Ed—

Well, the trick to arguing with Ed is that if you want to win, you shouldn’t even _start_ , because the combination of ever-increasing volume and ferociously single-minded logic will eventually steamroll even the most valid of points.

But in the event that it’s a battle worth waging all the same, the trick is to organize your evidence in order, from least to most convincing, and execute the outline calmly and precisely.  It also helps to prepare counterarguments to the usual objections, which tend to go along the lines of “That is the dictionary definition of mumbo-fucking- _jumbo_ ” or “A five-year-old would call bullshit on you right now, Mustang.”  The most important thing is staying as unflappable as possible while he ramps up towards the peak of his righteous hard-science-rage, because if you can get him tongue-tied, it basically counts as a draw.

It’s bizarre, too, to be looking forward to it—to Ed.  Ah, that is—Ed’s _appointment_.  To all of the snark and frustration and the cynical dismissals and the eye-rolling and the muttering and the rare but delightful occasions when he’ll actually hiss through his teeth like an aggravated cat.

It’s less bizarre to be looking forward to the way the stark lines of tension ease from his neck and his shoulders and his jaw—the way the harshness etched at the corners of his eyes smoothes out just _slightly_ ; the way his whole face softens when he relaxes, and he starts to talk about Al, or therapy dogs, or something quantum-physicky that occurred to him the other day.  It’s less bizarre to be looking forward to the way Roy’s whole chest fills and lights like a hurricane of fireworks when the gentle pressure of his hands can bring comfort, and the comfort turns to safety, and the safety leads to openness, and the openness makes Ed seem so _alive_.

In any case—the chakra.  It’s really no more mystical than all of this quantum business; it’s just a different way of interpreting the invisible weave of the fabric of the universe.  Plus it lets you choose your own rainbow—which he should really write down so he can use it as the title of his autobiography one of these days.

Also, if they’re such “mystical pseudo-science made-up crap,” why does he keep ending up with his rose quartz heart chakra rolling between his fingertips every time he thinks of Ed?

…Ed would probably say “It’s a psychosomatic self-fulfilling prophecy, you hippie _hack_ ,” but Roy is going to pretend he didn’t just hear that, loud and very well-enunciated, in his own darned head.

It’s good.  It’s all good.  The universe is charitable when you look at it the right way around; when you give positive energy, it circles back, even if it doesn’t take a form that you recognize, let alone expect.  Everything is good; everything is in balance, and…

And Roy catches sight of the minimalist clock face and realizes with a bit of a jolt that Ed is late.

Ed’s never late.

Ed’s like clockwork: tightly-wound, for one thing; and for another, he turns up on the dot, out of the ether, without fail, at the precise time he’s promised.  He holds to the clock hands like a code of honor, and Roy keeps trying to explain to him that sometimes when the world is flowing, you have to move _with_ it instead of marching to the beat of the secondhand; that you can’t let it tally out the individual moments of something as nebulous and beautiful as a human life…

But the point is that if Ed is late—

Something’s wrong.

It could be traffic, theoretically.  It could be a lot of things.  But something in Roy’s guts, something in his bones, something in the beat of his blood and the swell of his lungs knows that it’s something—

Bad.

He slings himself up out of the extraordinarily ergonomic and _deliciously_ comfortable hammock-chair (patent pending) which is also remarkably good to include in fantasies about patient-related sexcapades, and crosses to the soothingly-painted pastel front of his filing cabinet.  He pulls Ed’s manila folder—blood-red.  Some of them give him trouble, but he knew Ed’s color in an instant: vibrant and angry and powerful, searingly hot and maybe just a little bit scared of its own potential.

His phone trills at him as he taps out of his antioxidant tracker and into the maps app.  It occurs to him that he could just call, instead of showing up on Ed’s doorstep unannounced and probably unwanted.

But he trusts his instincts—it’s one of the hardest and the most valuable lessons he’s ever ground into his own brain over the years.  He trusts the feeling, fluttering too-bright and frantic in the pit of his stomach.  He trusts that the universe speaks in ways that are unquantifiable; in ways that can’t be transcribed, and that sometimes you have to believe in your own ability to listen.

He knows that Ed didn’t forget about the appointment and go to the grocery store to glare at the almonds and mutter unflattering things about Roy under his breath.  He knows that Ed didn’t sleep through his alarm.  He knowsthat it is not a coincidence; it is not harmless; it is not all right.  He _knows_ , which is why he checks Blanche’s water dish, strokes her head at her uncertain _whuff_ , locks up his office, grips his car keys in his right hand, and jogs down the stairs and out to the parking lot.

His Prius—which is called Fido—greets him with the usual soft, reluctant sort of whine as he pushes the button to start the engine.

“Me, too,” he says, fitting his phone into its little clasped mount above the radio panel.

As he draws out onto the street, he turns the music on—and then immediately off again.  Instead of acting as a pleasant distraction, it clashes so loudly with his thoughts that the cacophony is jarring; it’s like reaching for a butterfly and touching a wasp, and accepting the caprices of the world is one thing, but stung fingertips are another; and Ed’s home is much too far and all too close, and the slowly-building ache of the fear in Roy’s chest is hollowing him out with every heartbeat.

It’s all right.  It’s all right.  Whatever happens, whatever _has_ happened, they will cope; they will deal; they will adapt themselves to the contours of reality and chart out their course based on the terrain that lies before them.

It’ll be fine.  It _is_ fine; he’s just on his way to confirm that.

He keeps hitting red lights—over and over and fucking over; the green flickers out right when he enters snap-decision range, and you can’t _gun it_ in a hybrid, and the cops in this city are so overzealous he’d be mad to try—

Ed could be—

No.

Ed could be a lot of things, but speculating about the worst-case scenarios won’t prepare Roy for contingencies; it’ll only make him miserable until he finds out.  It’s not fair to himself, and it’s not fair to _Ed_ —if he gets himself worked up over things that haven’t even happened, he runs the risk of taking out the leftover emotional energy on its unwitting cause, and that’s one of ten-thousand ways to hurt people over a problem that doesn’t even exist.

Roy would kill for a real car right now.

Okay—no.  But he’d—maim someone.

Well—

He’d—

Walk on coals.  That he would definitely do.  Coals which were not endangering anyone else, which would be indescribably painful to him and him alone once he started strolling.

Sacrifice the self—the ego.  Never anyone else.  Never another being; never another life.  Conceptualizing one’s own is difficult enough; the value of another is past comprehension, and it should never be used as a bargaining chip.  Even in a theoretical game where he could trade an unthinkable action for an impossible item—even then, it’s arsenic dripping in down the walls of his skull, and he can’t let it fester there, or what might start growing next?

He’s half a mile from the cul-de-sac—just a little loop on the pixel-map on a tiny screen, but so damn _big_ in his head, in his thundering heart; just one more stoplight, which—

Goes yellow—then—red the instant he lays eyes on it.

He slams his hand on the wheel and catches the “ _Motherfucker_!” right as it bounces against the backs of his teeth; he swallows it down—every spiked leg of every letter—and drags in a deep breath.

It’s fine.  It’s going to be fine.  Fucking namaste.  Ed’s going to be all right; it’s probably nothing; it’s probably…

The world will go on no matter what it is.

Funny, how that’s comforting applied to his own life, and terrifying when it comes to Ed’s.

But it’s all part of the same circle, isn’t it?  Sacrifice the self.  Ed is capable of, is _destined_ for, things he himself can’t even begin to imagine, things Roy can sense more than he sees—the first glow of light on the horizon, fighting the darkness to be free.  Ed is beautiful in ways that mean so much more than just the mind-numbingly delicious shape of his perfect, perfect ass.  Underneath the endless, sedimented layers of agony compressing every part of him, there is a soul so absolutely golden that it’s blinding, and all Roy wants to do is _show_ him that it’s there.

Ed believes he’s broken.  Believing’s half the battle, and Roy is not about to let him lose.

If he’s even—

The light changes, and Roy puts the pedal to the floor; Fido jerks forward, making a high noise of electronic protest, but Roy’s knuckles bleach where his hands clench the wheel—

Because Ed is not afraid of anything—not of pain, not of disapproval, not of consequence.  He’s not afraid of living, or of dying, or of anything between.

But he’s tired.

And weariness—bone-deep, age-old, through-the-heart exhaustion—is so much harder to fight.

Roy whips the car around the turn so fast he almost clips the minivan that’s leaving; the whole circle is quaint little townhouse duplexes, and Ed’s address said _4A_ —

He parks Fido on the curb, practically strangles himself with his own seatbelt, tumbles out of the car, and starts up the walk at a run, with the key fob beeping at him insistently to tell him that he hasn’t stopped the car—

One foot on the doorstep, and his mind skids to a halt, replaying snatched-up fragments of the little conversations—Ed ranting about Al’s unhealthy obsession with morning classes; the quaver of guilt in Ed’s voice even questioning who should take precedence with the schedule of their air filters, between the boy who’s allergic to everything under the sun and the one who hears machine-gun fire in every rattle of the fans; the eye-scrubbing annoyance at the fact that boot camp ruined him for staying in bed past sunrise, regardless of the quality of his sleep the night before; the slow, slow, halting question, hesitant because he knew the answer— _Does everybody have to go around three times and double-check the locks on all the windows before they can convince themselves to leave?_

Nothing will be open.  Nothing will be unattended and unlocked.  This was a fool’s errand; this is a dead end—

No.  He has to remember.  He has to remember to believe that the world can be kind when you ask kindly; that the energy you put into the lives of those around you feeds back into your own.  Good things happen—they don’t have to be bought and paid for; they aren’t necessarily earned; but they _happen_.  When you open your eyes, your heart, your lungs, your veins; when you tap into the ever-shifting currents of the world; when you participate in your own life without trying to control the movement of the electricity around you—

He has to remember to let go.  He has to remember to unclasp his clenched hands and let things be—to reach out and take them, yes, but to take them as they _are_.  To take them mindfully and gratefully and not too tightly, and to release them when they start to slip.

He draws in a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and sets his hand on the doorknob.

He twists.

It turns.

The door opens into a narrow entryway with framed pictures on the walls; a fraction of his heart yearns recklessly to see them, but the rest of him’s already running.

“Ed?” he calls.  “Ed—”

No answer but the hum of the infamous filters; no _What the fuck are you doing here_ ; no _I’m all right, I’m all right_ ; no indignant howl from the shower; no…

Anything.

Despite his size—or perhaps, Roy often thinks, because of it—Ed’s always easy to find.  For all that he snarls and bristles like a threatened alley cat at every opportunity, his physical presence is so profoundly warm that he practically radiates light—gold light, bright gold light; and sometimes, Roy thinks, blue.  Ed’s got the closest thing most people will see to an aura this side of a migraine—in addition to which, he takes up _space_.  He makes himself known.  There are times he doesn’t want to; there are times he collapses his shoulders and condenses himself and starts to disappear, but mostly… It’s not even that he makes himself bigger so much as that he makes the most of what he is—broad shoulders, fine ass, gravity-scorning hair and gleaming metal wound up with the gold.  He’s hard to miss.

Well—he’s easy to miss, late nights and sleepless mornings; but he’s nearly impossible not to find.  You can feel him from the other side of the room.

Which is why it’s so damn disconcerting that Roy can’t sense a thing right now.

“Ed,” he says again—through the little living room piled with books on books and stacks of _Nature_ magazines; through the cozy kitchen, patterned mugs hung on tiny hooks, kitten-face teapot on the countertop, word magnets and square ones with element names in bright colors scattered on the refrigerator door—

A sharp turn into another dim, semi-claustrophobic hallway (is it the feng shui or the fear that’s making it so small?), and then two doors—one left open, and a glimpse of off-white bedspread with silhouettes of little cats; one—

Shut.

He knocks.  He knocks harder.

“Ed,” he says.

He has to remember; he _has_ to remember—

He tries the handle.

The door opens, but none of the details of the room register, because Ed is curled up on the carpet with both arms wrapped tight around his head, metal fingers buried in his hair.

He’s breathing.

Barely—high-fast-quick and ragged, little hitches that can’t be getting any useful amount of oxygen into his system—but it counts.

And Roy knows—

That this is the part he hides from.  This is the part he crams into the corners; this is what waits in the background, biding its time.  This is what lies beneath the gestures—true, important gestures, but they’re shadow puppets all the same.  This is what no zenith of zen acceptance, however genuine, can change.

Good things happen.  They happen more often when you hold yourself open to embrace them; when you anticipate without expecting; when you carry the positivity forward in everything you do.

Good things happen.

Shitty things happen, too.

And sometimes shitty things happen to the people who have already suffered so much for so long that they don’t believe in the existence of the good things anymore.

Sometimes shitty things happen to people like Ed, who are so used to being beat down and kicked while they’re cringing that they’ve built up walls of retaliatory anger—of preemptive resentment—and the cynicism is like cyanide working through them slowly; and they’re so used to disappointment that it doesn’t even sting them anymore; and they can’t taste the poison that they’re breathing in.

Sometimes shitty things happen to people like Ed, and they _keep_ happening, and it’s hardly his fault if the defensive shell has been so necessary his whole life that he can’t even understand that there are good things it’s keeping out, too.

Ed has spent his whole life protecting himself from a world that has always done its damnedest to hurt him.

This—something as horrifying as finding him lying on the floor writhing in pain—this is just another droplet in the ocean as far as Ed’s concerned.

And sometimes even good swimmers drown.

“Ed,” Roy says, in his softest voice, his calmest voice—the gentlest, deepest, closest-to-the-soul voice he hears in his head when he meditates.  He crouches down and lays his hand as lightly as he can on Ed’s shoulder.  “It’s R—”

“Fuck you,” Ed chokes out, and the words all shudder, the muscle contracts perceptibly under Roy’s fingertips.  “ _Ahh_ —fuck—f-fucking—” He curls up tighter, tighter, and the faint sound of agony that slips out of him cuts into the center of Roy’s chest like a carving knife.  “It f-fucking—”

“I know,” Roy says.

“You _don’t_ ,” Ed grinds out; he shakes and shakes and shakes, and his right hand spasms, and the fingers hook tighter into his hair.  “Don’t—f-fucking—touch me—” He convulses, and he takes a good-sized chunk of Roy’s heart into the depths of hell right with him.  “ _God_ —”

Is it better to keep the pads of his fingertips pressed to Ed’s bicep to reinforce that he’s not alone, or is the addition of another sensation only going to make this worse?

Roy takes a deep breath.  “What hu—”

“Fucking _everything_!”

His instinct is to grip Ed’s shoulder and try to ground him, but this is—oh, hell.  This teeters on the border of hysteria.  This is a kind and caliber of pain that would crack the mind of a lesser human being; Roy’s watched Ed endure torments to his nerves the likes of which would reduce most people to—well, _this_ —and trudge straight through them with a grimace and a shrug.

Roy licks his lips; scans Ed’s spine and his shoulder-blades; nothing’s obviously misaligned, but— “How often—”

“Just _leave_!”  The gasping sharpens, harsher by the second, into sobs.  “Fucking— _go_ , what are you— _fuck_ —”

He will not panic.  He _won’t_ ; Ed needs him to be stable now, whether either of them likes it or not.

“Where’s your phone?” he asks, glancing up for it—surely it ought to rest on the nightstand?  But the table’s bare except for a small black digital clock and a reading lamp.  “Where…” His is still in the car.  Or it will be, unless some hooligans wandering the neighborhood noticed his unlocked doors and purring engine and—

No.  He has to trust in people, in the concept of people—now and always.

“I’ll be right back,” he says.

Of course there’s no landline; of course he has to run outside, down the little pathway, back to Fido; of course he slips climbing into the car and bangs his shin on the edge of the door—

Of fucking _course_ —

He beeps the locks this time; his hands are shaking so hard he can’t put his fucking passcode in on the screen the first time, or the second, or—

Stop.  Breathe.  Zen.  Acceptance.  Peace with the universe.  Zen, zen, zen.

He doesn’t even need the stupid passcode; there’s that emergency button.

He’s fine.  He’s fine; everything’s fine; the line is ringing; his chakras are aligned, and his veins are leylines laid back when the world was new; he is a figment of evolution’s imagination, and his purpose is to move, to carry on, to build, to _be_ ; that’s all that’s asked of him, and all he wants.  He’s fine.  It’s going to be okay.

“911 dispatch,” a woman’s voice says.  “What’s your emergency?”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Roy hears himself say.

Oops.

“Sorry,” he says.  “Ah—I need—I need an ambulance; I’m at—Charland Circle, number 4, apartment A—”

“Charland, 4A,” she says, and she is _much_ too calm about all of this, which he sort of despises and admires at once.  “Can you tell me what happened?”

“It’s—” Deep breaths; deep damn breaths; he needs… not to trip over the threshold on his way back into the house; is he incapable of running and talking and keeping his damn head all at the same time?  “I’m—a chiropractor, my patient—” Shitfuck _God_.  “I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right, sir,” she says.  “Just slow down.”

“Early twenties male,” he says.

“Conscious?”

“Barely.”  One of the word magnets says _pulchritudinous_ , and the letters imprint themselves on the surface of his brain.  “I think it’s—he has lots of—chronic pain; I think maybe nerve damage; I think—”

“Are you in a safe place, sir?”

“I’m here,” Roy says, which sounds—immensely stupid, come to think of it.  “I mean—I’m at the residence.  It’s safe.”

Ed hasn’t moved from his spot on the floor, but he’s still shuddering hard enough to set the bedside lamp to trembling.

“Exactly what’s happening, sir?”

“Just—” Roy kneels again, touches Ed’s shoulder; the skin’s on fire.  “He’s really—he’s in so much pain—can you send some—”

Ed recoils and then groans.  “The fuck are you talking t—” His breath catches, then hisses back out of him, and he half-rolls over, eyes winched open halfway— “ _No_ fucking _hospital_ shit—”

“Is this the best callback number for you, sir?” the dispatcher asks.

“Yes,” Roy says.

Ed fumbles, grabs Roy’s wrist—with the metal hand, and his grasp transcends _too-tight from urgency_ and leaps right into _agonizing death grip_.

“No—” he growls. “—fucking— _hospitals_.”

“You need something stronger than I can give you,” Roy says.  A terrible little light flickers on in his head.  “I’ll pay for it if you need me to—the ambulance and whatever the visit ends up costing.  Is that the—”

“Sir?”

“Sorry,” he says.  Ed’s eyes are slivers of molten brass, so _scalding_ hot, and his grip’s so tight Roy’s fingertips are numb— “ _Ah_ —”

It’s the twitch of the corner of Ed’s mouth that gives it away—in that instant, the rage and the pain slip aside for just long enough to unveil a cavernous void of absolute—

Terror.

“Make ’em _cancel_ the fucking ambulance,” he says through clenched teeth, and he squeezes his eyes shut.  “No fucking—doctors and needles and— _none_ of that shit—”

“Sir, are you there?”

“Yes,” he says, and his heart beats light and fast in his throat—swift and skipping, frantic, like the dapple of desperate rain, like a wild animal panicked with the impulse to escape.  “Do you need anything else?”

“That’s everything,” she says.  “We’ll send someone as soon as we can, sir.”

He wants to ask her if that means five minutes or fifteen or thirty-something—wants to ask her if she thinks Ed can _survive_ that long; wants to ask he if she has the slightest damn idea what he should do in the meantime—

“ _Fuck_ you, Mustang,” Ed forces out.

“What am I supposed to do?” he asks, and really that’s a question for both Ed and the operator—although he’s only expecting one of the answers to involve anything other than a suggestion about spiked objects and his orifices.

“Keep him calm,” the dispatcher says.  “No medication; don’t move him.  Keep talking to him.”

At least if Ed tries to murder him, the EMTs will already be on the way.

“Right,” Roy says, and if it sounds weak even to his own ears, it’s hardly his fault at this point, is it?  “Do you know about how long it’s going to be?”

“Can’t say, sir.  When you hear the sirens, if it’s safe to leave him, you can meet them outside to help direct them in.”

“All right,” he says, and he puts the phone down on the floor without even hanging up.

Is there an app for _this_?  An emergency response app?  _How to deal with possibly-life-or-death situations for dummies_?  There must be some kind of a pain manager or a vitals-checker or—

“Fucking _hate_ fucking hospitals,” Ed mumbles, and then he gasps in another breath, sharp-edged and sudden, and tenses anew.

“I know,” Roy says, more because it’s the ingrained language code for _I’m trying to be sympathetic, but I have no idea what to say_ than because he has the slightest concept of what Ed feels.  He reaches out to lay his hand on Ed’s arm again.  Ed doesn’t shake him off.  “Has this happened before?”

Ed musters a dry, croaking fragment of a laugh.  It’s a sick sound—a _wrong_ sound; overwhelmingly sardonic and devastatingly matter-of-fact.

Unfortunately, it answers the question.

“How often?” Roy tries next.  “How does it start?”

He doesn’t—

Want to hear the response to that one.

He doesn’t want to hear it, because he doesn’t want confirmation of what a part of him already knows.

It’s his fault.

It’s not his _doing_ —not at a basic level; Ed’s body was damaged past description long before it ever landed under Roy’s hands—but he made it worse.  He set out cloaked as some kind of savior, but when the fabric falls away—

He’s a charlatan.  He’s a fucking _fake_.  He paints himself like a beacon of knowledge, of understanding, of power, of _aid_ —

And this is what he does.  This is what his hands make; this is what he wreaks.  After everything he’s had—all of the opportunities, all the magnificent good luck, everything he’s been given— _this_ is what he gives back.

He touches someone like Ed—someone riven through with pain of every possible type; someone who’s never felt safe, or whole, or _happy_ —

And he makes it worse.

“Since f-fucking—” The metal hand clenches tighter in Ed’s hair and tugs hard.  Roy can’t fight the instinct to grab it and start prying the fingers open, working them carefully loose.  “—quit—fucking—” Ed drags in a breath.  “Since—fucking d-deployment.  F-fucked up—” He gasps; Roy grips his wrist tighter, and the metal fingers tremble like narrow branches in a storm.  “Fucked up—all kinds of shit over there; started to—I mean, it wasn’t great to st-start with, ’cause of—” His body shudders in a way that might be directed towards the automail.  “—and—it all just—went to fuckin’ hell.  Broke a lot of—bones, whatever shit.  Everything.  ’F I get out of bed wrong, it just—quits.  Fucking t-tweak one thing, and the whole fucking house of c-cards comes down.”

Roy wants to—

Hug him, hold him, stroke his hair, kiss his face, soothe the fucking pain, promise it’ll be all right, _make_ it true somehow—

He picks the last few strands of hair free of the metal knuckle joints and wraps his hand around them.  Ed starts squeezing, and it hurts; Roy’s blood beats hard and frantic against the pressure, and the interlocking plates of the metal palm rasp on his.

“Is it—” He takes a breath.  “Is it worse since…?”

“Since what?” Ed asks, twisting just enough to crack one of those gorgeous eyes open and glare at him with it.

Roy gestures vaguely to the pair of them, tangled here with Ed in agony.  “Since…”

The eye narrows to a slit of amber, and then the lashes flick apart.

“You mean—” Ed’s face contorts in a way Roy can’t even begin to parse with his heart thrumming in his ears like this.  “Since I—is it worse since _you_?”

It’d be nice if he had the guts and/or the balls and/or the gumption to come right out and say it, but he does think it stands to his credit that he nods.

“Fuckin’ hell, Mustang,” Ed mutters, and his mouth’s a thin line creased around the corners with the pain, and Roy can’t begin to guess—

Cue sirens.

For a second, Roy legitimately thinks they’re just in his head—like some sort of “Kill Bill” soundtrack kind of personal warning system kindly reminding him that he just _fucked up_ , as if he’d forgotten in the past three dangerously rapid heartbeats.

Then he remembers that the Doppler effect doesn’t tend to happen inside of his own skull, and—

“I’ll be right back,” he says.

What Ed half-grumbles and half-moans into the carpet sounds a lot like _Of course you will, asshole_ , but that doesn’t make much sense in context, does it?  So either he’s starting to get delusional, which is a bad sign; or Roy’s ears are starting to go, which isn’t a whole lot better.  Maybe he can get his hearing tested at the hospital, just in case.

In the meantime, he settles with careening through the Elric brothers’ residence and hurling himself back out the door, waving his arms as he goes.

“Here!” he says, which is probably entirely unnecessary; likely there’s a whole section of EMT training dedicated to spotting the wild-eyed caller leaping around on the front step trying to flag you down.

Odds are high that they’re actually moving extremely fast and extremely efficiently, but to Roy it seems like slow-mo through molasses on a hazy day; at one point, until he blinks hard, he honestly believes they’re going backwards.  Was that a brief and ill-timed moonwalk in tribute to the late MJ, or is this entire incident affecting him _far_ too much?

He’ll have to sort it out later; just now—

“Are you the one who called it in, sir?” the medic in front asks, and the other ones are getting a stretcher, so he nods a lot and starts beckoning.  “Male, mid-twenties, is that correct?  Is he stable?”

“Maybe?” Roy says.  Hopefully they realize that’s in answer to the second question; he’s more confident about the first, but it seems less important, and…

He really needs to breathe.  He really needs to breathe deeply and from his center, several times, and focus his energies, and sustain some inner—

The second he sees Ed curled up on the floor like a tortured animal, his heart drops right out of him again.

“Ed,” he says, kneeling and reaching out in one motion, and anyone who thinks yoga doesn’t improve balance and coordination is a _lying_ liar who _lies_ , “are—”

“Please step aside, sir,” the head EMT says, and it’s hard to argue with someone who saves lives every day.

Well—it’s just as easy as arguing with anybody else, but probably stupid, and a petty EMT could do damage the likes of which doesn’t bear thinking about, so he bites his tongue and shifts back to stay out of the way.

Ed makes a noise so agonizingly bereft that it takes everything Roy’s got not to dive forward again and scoop that poor, beautiful boy up in both his arms and just— _hold him_.  So warm, so tight, with so much of his _soul_ in it that all of this would melt and disappear—

“Don’t—” Ed chokes out as they start to move him—gently, by the looks of it, but Roy’s heart’s up from the carpet and back in his body now, the better to rattle around his throat and stop his mouth.  “—touch me—”  His voice breaks.  Roy’s heart does, too.  “Mustang, d-don’t you _dare_ fucking l-leave me with the—”

“I’m coming with you,” Roy says to the EMT.  “Is that allowed?”  Wait.  “I don’t care if that’s allowed.  I can pay.”

They’re lifting Ed onto the narrow little stretcher, though he’s still coiled up so tight his shoulders are straining; the metal rings and scrapes against itself as he shakes.  The sound that escapes him racks Roy’s ears; it’s like the ungodly lovechild of a hysterical laugh and a rough-throated scream.

“ _Bribes_ ,” he musters, gasping.  “Real f-f-fucking _zen_ , Mustang—”

“Easy,” one of the EMTs says as the other lifts the foot of the stretcher faster than she’s raising the head of it.

Roy figures no answer is almost as good as a weary, resigned sort of a _yes_ in this situation, so he follows them right the hell down the hall and out the door—and _then_ he realizes—

Ed won’t have his house keys _or_ his phone to contact Al, and it’d be awful to leave the door unlocked with no one here with everything else—

So he sets off running again—scrambling back to Ed’s room, and where in _God’s_ name does the boy keep his personal effects?  He should have a hook, or a magnet, or a pinboard; or a repurposed ashtray or vase; or a designated place on the nightstand, because ordered objects are the manifestation of an ordered being, and…

Desktop—phone screen gleaming next to a pile of shining steel with teeth.

Fervently regretting his lack of pockets, Roy jams his own phone into the waistband of his pants, snatches up the keys, races back outside, slams the door and locks it, and bounds over to the ambulance, where they’re trying to bundle Ed into the back despite the way he’s thrashing like—

Like they’re making it worse.

“ _Hey_!” he calls, but it’s not like they’re going to hear him over the ragged howls tearing free of Ed’s throat, or their own tetchy communications as they try to strap Ed down on the stretcher so that they can lift it into the ambulance.

More running.  Great cardio.  So’s the blind panic.

“ _Roy_ —” Ed grits out just as he gets close, flailing the softer arm towards him, and it feels like a bell struck in the center of his chest—like the resonance of a single note chiming off of crystal—loud, sweet, shuddering, and devastatingly clear.

One of the EMTs thrusts her shoulder in front of him.  “Sir, it’s really not safe for you to be—”

“Excuse me,” Roy says.  “I’m his chiropractor.”

It is extremely difficult to get respect in this city—well, anywhere—when you’re wearing black and silver workout pants and a neon pink off-the-shoulder custom-printed T-shirt with the full lyrics of “Safety Dance” spiraling around your torso.

People are _so_ closed-minded.

One of the EMTs starts to say “Are you sure?”, but Ed’s flailing with the other arm now, and he puts the metal elbow into the closest attendant’s stomach, and while they’re doubling over and wheezing, and everyone’s expressing varying degrees of concern and/or shock, Ed fixes Roy’s nearest wrist in a vise grip with _both_ hands.

“Ow,” Roy says.

“Fuck,” the head EMT says.

“Fuck _you_ ,” Ed snarls through his teeth—at someone other than Roy, for once; he would like the record to be painstakingly clear on that point.

“Just let him,” the other EMT says.  “We’re never getting out of here otherwise.  Unless we amputate his hand.”

“And then you’d have to take me for the bleeding anyway,” Roy says.  “Why don’t we not amputate my hand and say we did?”

The head EMT is giving the rule-breakers an evil eye that would make Riza enormously proud.

“Fine,” she says after a fraught second.  “Stay _out_ of the way, sir.”

He’s about to acquiesce when he finds himself being shoved up and crammed into a space so small he can’t lift his head all the way without colliding with equipment or banging his skull on the roof.  The only position he can find to take up that doesn’t obstruct something important-looking hung overhead or from the walls is an awkward half-crouch in the tiny corner behind the passenger seat, with one of his knees crushed right up against the frame of the stretcher.

Thank goodness for all those squats.  This will burn tomorrow, but he’ll survive.

…at least, he _hopes_ so.  He has a moment of doubt when they slam the back doors shut with a sound like a sledgehammer falling on the axis of the universe.

“Mustang—” Ed croaks out, writhing against the restraints; the tendons in his neck stand out in ever-tightening ropes, which is going to wreak merry hell on the aggravated nerve in his shoulder, and Roy can actually _see_ his pulse beating far too fast in his jugular.

The lead EMT has grabbed his forearm and raised a needle.  Because of course she has.

“Is that strictly necessary?” Roy manages.

He can’t really blame her for the venomous _Don’t you dare fucking tell me how to do my job in my own workplace_ vibe—he can only imagine how often she has to put up with variations on that theme from people with all kinds of intentions.  Probably it’s mostly men.

The engine turns over, and they all lurch to the side as the driver drags this whole mad caravan around the cul-de-sac and back out towards the road.

“Needles,” Roy says, raising his voice over the noise, torn between feeling helplessly chagrined under her gaze and fiercely protective as Ed breathes harshly, straining to twist his spine up off of the stretcher.  “He’s—really—”

“It’s a sedative,” she says.  Her hand’s barely wavered despite the rocking of their entire environment as they rumble over potholes and divider lines alike.

“Don’t need to be f-fucking _sedated_ —” Ed reaches for Roy with both hands, and it’s not even voluntary; Roy clasps them tight.  A small, guiltily-flitting thought: is Ed even going to remember this later?  Will he appreciate it?  Does it _mean_ anything to him, or does he just need someone to cling to, and Roy’s the closest physical being that’s not trying to stick him with a hypodermic?  “Need—fucking—opioids.  Something.  ’M not allergic to iodine if shots’re all you got—fuck’s sake, just— _please_ —”

If he wrings Roy’s hands any harder, they’re going to have two patients to deal with.  He tries to convey that to the head EMT with nothing more than a plaintive look—he’s been told his puppy eyes are irresistible and legendary.  Admittedly, he said it to himself in the mirror while he was practicing them, but it should still count.

“Christ,” the EMT mutters.  “Jared, hook him to the fentanyl—”

And then Jared is clamping the little diamond-shaped inhaler mask down over Ed’s face, and Ed’s eyelids flutter, and Roy can’t fight the instinct to touch his hair—half just to make sure he’s still here, still solid, still moving, breathing, real.  It’s soaked in sweat, no damn surprise; what can he do but card his fingers gently through the damply-hanging bangs and try not to topple over as the ambulance swings around another corner so fast it feels like they’re on a roller coaster?

Would it be rude to ask how far it is?  He’s already imposing just by being here; he shouldn’t push his luck.  Ed has his eyes squeezed shut now; he dropped the right hand to his side, but the left stays wrapped around Roy’s, tight enough to tingle.  Funny, in a manner of speaking.  He always figured on some electricity the first time they held hands, but he didn’t think it’d be like this.

He rubs with the pad of his free hand’s thumb—very gently—at the little spot right above Ed’s collarbone, which is one of about six hundred places tension goes to lurk and settle and multiply.

“Hey,” he says, as softly as he dares with all the ambient rattling and the rush of traffic around them.  “Is that any better?”

Stupid question—not the question itself, really, but the fact that he asked when Ed’s got a thick layer of plastic between his mouth and an audible answer.

Ed responds, though, with what looks like either a concentrated spasm of pain or a slight nod.  Roy withdraws his hand from the world’s most beautiful clavicle; is he making it worse?  He always does; he always is; surely—

To be fair, though, if he provides nothing but constant exacerbation of the existing pain, that begs the question of why Ed is still paying him decent money for the privilege.  Ed is—to understate matters perhaps more grossly than he ever has since that time in the first grade when he began a book report with _“The universe is pretty big, actually”_ —extremely intelligent and unerringly logical.  He wouldn’t shell out cash for something exclusively unpleasant, and since he seems to be physiologically incapable of receiving Roy’s increasingly neon and flashing _I would like to have all of the sex with you please_ signals, it’s not like there are any noticeable fringe benefits to turning up and getting his miserable muscles and bones beaten up and realigned.  It must not be all bad.  Roy must be contributing something of benefit to Ed’s existence in order to have remained a part of it for as long as he has.  Few fools would call Ed a quitter, but he’d go to another guy with a gold-stickered certificate on the wall if he _really_ believed that three months of bitching and moaning under Roy’s hands and tutelage had been a total waste.

Curious.

Curious, and encouraging.

But it doesn’t change this.  It doesn’t change now.  It doesn’t change Jared and the one who wants to put a scalpel through Roy’s testicles monitoring Ed’s vital signs like he’s about to go into shock or a coma or cardiac arrest—

And who’s to say he won’t?

Roy aside, Roy’s whole being _irrelevant_ —how bad is this?  And how much worse is it likely to get?

There isn’t much more time to mull over it while Ed strangles the hell out of his hand: momentarily, they screech to a halt—which Roy had sort of assumed was something that only happened in movies; but he’d also sort of figured that was true of approximately half of what’s taken place today, so he supposes that’s fair.

The paramedics have flung open the doors and started wheeling the gurney down onto the pavement before Roy’s righted himself from tumbling backwards and slamming into the back of the driver’s seat when they stopped.

He scrambles down the suddenly empty bay of the ambulance and down off of the bumper to follow, but they’re already at the entrance to the E.R.—Ed’s left hand flutters upward briefly, like a flag of surrender, as the automatic doors hiss open, and then they barrel through.

Roy forces his startled body directly from a standstill to a run, but they’re too damned _efficient_ —which he never thought he’d say of a government-funded anything, but that doesn’t change how fast they race through the lobby towards the nearest hallway—

The cavalcade thunders towards the front desk, and the receptionist glances up and calls “Elric?” after the paramedics as they rattle past.  A female doctor with a long brown ponytail steps out, looking up from her clipboard and sidestepping in the nick of time.

“Hi, Ed,” she says.

The terrible groan Ed musters sounds almost like a greeting.  Sort of.  Not really at all.

“Wait!” Roy attempts.  “I’m his—”

Doctor?  Sort-of-chiropractor?  Massage therapist, _wink wink_?

“Forty-five’s open,” the real doctor—hell, that still rankles just a bit—says, gesturing to the indefatigable paramedics.  “I’ll be there in a second.  Can I help you, sir?”

The last to him—with a side-dish of blocking the hallway so that he can’t just follow them.

She’s five feet and hardly any spare, but her eyes remind him of Riza’s, and that alone is sufficient to stop him in his tracks.

“I’m with him,” Roy says, trying to point without putting a hair into her personal space.  “Can I—”

“Are you a family member?” she asks.

“No,” he says.  He clears his throat.  “But I’m—”

“Wait over there,” she says, nodding over to the excruciatingly un-ergonomic chairs bolted to each other and the wall.  Roy’s spine tingles with a premonition of misery just looking at them.  “Someone will come tell you when you can see him.”

He tries again.  “But I—”

She eyes him.

 _Have a certificate_ dies on his tongue.

“We’ll take care of him,” she says.  “Sit.”

It’s not persuasion so much as coercion by way of vague fear of intense retribution, but he supposes they’re more or less the same in the end anyway.

He crosses the room and sits.

At least she doesn’t smile or roll her eyes or gloat or anything before she turns on her heel and strides off down the hall, hopefully to alleviate Ed’s incomprehensible pain.

Roy crosses his legs and puts one elbow on the armrest.  The armrest is made of textured plastic, so putting his elbow on it hurts.  He puts his arm down and crosses his legs the other way.  He scoots back until he’s sitting right at the very back of the chair seat, which should _theoretically_ reduce the strain which his instinct to slouch would inflict.  He forces himself to sit upright.  He uncrosses his legs; that’ll strain his hips.  He folds his arms over his chest instead.  He swallows.  He sighs.

He tugs his phone out from where it has gamely endured this whole adventure inside the waistband of his pants, having gotten chummy with Ed’s house-keys and miraculously clung to him despite all of the turbulence and turmoil during the ambulance ride.  He just wants to storm down that hall and _help_ , but—

What he knows how to do hasn’t fixed this yet.  He’s no damn use right now.

He glances at the time on his phone screen, then taps his first speed-dial and waits while the line rings twice.

“What do you need?” Riza says.

“Only your affection,” he says.  “Possibly your respect.”

“Uh huh,” she says.

“I need a favor,” he says.

“Hang on,” she says.  “I’m paralyzed with shock.”

He sets his jaw.  “I’m in the emergency room.”

Silence, for a long and—guilty as it makes him feel—vindicating second.

“Is everything all right?” she asks, much more gently.

“It’s Ed,” he says.  “I—I mean, I think… we’ll have to see.  I don’t think it’s life-threatening, but it’s not… good.”

“What can I do?” she asks.

“I’m going to stay here as long as I have to,” he says, narrowly resisting the urge to say that loud enough for the receptionist to hear.  “Can you look after Blanche for me?”

He still stands by his assertion that it’s the best dog name in the history of domesticated animals.  She is, after all, as he explained to Riza in gleeful jubilation after he hit on the thought, a female golden retriever—a Golden Girl.  It’s brilliant.  He’s brilliant.  At the pregnant pause, he said so, and Riza said _I’m glad that you think so_ , because she hates him and enjoys his suffering.

But in a loving way.

Which is why it’s no surprise that she says, “Of course.”

Too late, he remembers that she’s one of those terrible, awful, conniving carnivore people that he has to set out conditions for, and he adds, as fast as he can make his mouth form the syllables, “But don’t feed her any m—”

“What?” she says.  “Roy, you’re breaking up; I can’t hear a word you’re saying.  Text me later and let me know what happens, okay?  Good luck; goodbye!”

She hangs up on him.

The _witch_.

That’s what happens when you eat meat, isn’t it?  All of the carcinogenic proteins and the poisonous preservatives worm their way into your bloodstream and slowly erode your soul.

It’s incredible that the WHO has only implicated bacon so far.

He shakes his head slowly to mourn the tragic loss of her quintessence, and then he taps over to the single most soothing of all of his mindless fair-etrade puzzle games.

He spares a glance for his battery, which is somehow in the red zone even though he charged this ridiculous piece of diversionary circuitry _last night_.

The universe is testing him today, and no mistake.  He breathes in, holds it for a count of five, and exhales slowly.  He sets the phone down on his thigh and counts out his chakra beads.  He is going to handle this with grace and calm and peaceful serenity if it _kills_ him.

He’s all right.  He’s all right.  He’s going to be all right.  He has to trust the energy of the world around him; he has to trust that he has put enough kindness into it.  He has to balance himself enough to accept whatever happens.  He has to remember that “good” and “bad” are human concepts—subjective judgments proclaimed by tiny passengers who can’t even fathom the size of the train, let alone understand the track, let _alone_ realize that there is no “right” destination.

If the flow of life carries Ed towards warmth, so be it.  If not—so be it, too.  If either, or neither—if somewhere in between—all he can do is commit the best and the most of himself to the future.

He draws another long breath and then picks up his phone, stands, and crosses to the desk.

“Excuse me,” he says to the receptionist.

She looks him up and down, and her eyebrow actually twitches as she tries not to react.

“Sorry to bother you,” he says, because people can’t help what they’re taught, and sometimes they’re taught that he’s detestable.  “Do you know if the gift shop sells charger cables?”

“Probably,” she says, in a tone that was meant for something more along the lines of _If I say yes, will you go away?_

“Okay,” he says.  “Thank you.”  He pauses, intending to ask her where to find it, and then turns to see if the directory sign has any indication, so that he won’t look like a fool.

It does.  Good for him for thinking ahead.

He starts off in the direction indicated by the helpful blue arrow on the sign.  Surely you can’t wander these sticky-floored halls for too much of eternity before you encounter a landmark.

He should have begged the woman at the desk to call the gift shop if, by some chance, someone stopped by to say he could see Ed—but going back and groveling would take just enough time that he might very well be back with a charger cable by then, so the opportunity cost—

He needs to slow down—not at walking: this brisk pace is a nice, gentle stimulant for his cardiovascular system, for one thing; and for another it’ll get him there and back faster.  But the thoughts.  He needs to stem the flood of disordered what-ifs, because him panicking won’t help Ed or anyone.  This is about helping Ed.  This is about determining what Ed needs from this point forward, and trying to fill that position.

…damn, it’s hard to think the words _fill_ and _position_ without letting his mind wander in a rather humid direction, even at a time like this.

The stupid gift shop must be _somewhere_ in this enormous, sterile-smelling maze.  One of the dimly-buzzing fluorescent lights overhead just flickered.  Was one of these indistinguishable turns actually a barrier between universes, and he just wandered into a zombie movie?  The ceiling is markedly lower here.  There aren’t any windows.  He’s really not sure if he’s going to make it to the gift shop _alive_ , at this rate; did he just hear a decomposing throat release a long, ravenous groan—?

He walks a little faster.

Probably he’s just imagining all sorts of unlikely things simply because his brain’s in overdrive after the events of the past—what, hour?

But… just in case.

The last thing he wants to do is get consumed by the ranging undead right when Ed needs him the most, after all.

Surely it’s totally normal for the halls to be this empty.  Surely it’s totally normal to hear occasional scuffles and murmurs from angles he can’t identify.  Surely it’s totally normal for unrevealing blue arrows to keep leading him around endless quantities of turns and corners, perpetually, and none of this has _anything_ to do with hordes of slavering reanimated corpses waiting just out of his sightline to hurl their tortured bodies at him and sink their rotting teeth into his flesh—

Maybe Riza’s right, and he should never try to cure insomnia with a late-night horror movie binge _ever again_.

Fortunately, the universe is kind, and it allows a little windowed nook helpfully labeled “GIFT SHOP” to materialize out of the beige-walled oblivion shortly before Roy loses his nerve and makes a break for the exit.

He strides in, flushed with determination, or possibly with a faint touch of zombie-related panic, only to be met with a wall of vaguely sparkly, unsettlingly wide-eyed stuffed animals.  They seem to come in every imaginable color except white.

That’s even _worse_ than zombies.

He staggers a few steps backwards and manages to tear his eyes away from the endless shiny buttons staring back at him.

There’s a girl who looks about twenty with her elbow propped up by the register and her chin balanced on her hand.  She’s also staring at him, but at least she doesn’t seem to be gazing into the unplumbed depths of his immortal soul.

“Hi,” he says.  He holds up his phone, tilting the bottom edge towards her so she can see the shape of the jack, because his benumbed brain cannot even begin to conjure the model number right now.  “You have…?”

She points towards a rack in the opposite corner which proudly proclaims _Licensed Apple Retailer_ at the top.  At this rate, he’d happily invalidate his warranty if it meant getting out of this horrifying place, but this is a good sign that the universe might just be tilting back into his favor.

He is not going to think about the fact that these charger cables probably cost the Apple Corporation several cents to produce by way of outsourcing and dubious labor practices; he is just going to thank the various powers that he recently bought a phone case with slots for credit cards and ID.

He pays, collects his horrible plastic clamshell box, accepts his receipt, thanks the cashier as sane-soundingly as he can manage, and talks himself down from the urge to run as he steps out and starts back through the halls again.

What are they even doing to Ed back there?  How long is it going to take?  What effects is it going to have—now, and in the long-term?

Asking all the hypotheticals won’t help with the reality; he has to stop letting his mind race.  Ed’s going to need a rock—a foundation, not a flitting wind.

He should have gotten Ed something at the gift shop.  Something small; something stupid that would make him laugh.

He stops.

He vacillates.

He turns around and jogs back towards the gift shop.

There’s something to be said for single-mindedness, but he didn’t even glance around himself—and an unawareness of one’s surroundings is never commendable; it lands you in situations like this.  There’s a fine line between single-minded and selfish.  There are fine lines everywhere—millions of tiny threads; it’s like one of those laser mazes in a bad action movie, and you’re supposed to backflip in between them and bounce off the walls and somehow avoid ever tripping the alarm and—

Well.  The point is, if he wanted to be Tom Cruise—which he doesn’t, and never has, except for maybe a four-day stretch right after Top Gun came out in theaters—he’d be on a very different path, with a very different trajectory.  As it is, he has to make his peace with occasionally falling face-first over a laser trip-wire and move ahead from there.

The girl at the register doesn’t even look surprised to see him again.  Maybe she’s staunchly pretending that he’s not a societal failure right now, which makes two of them.

There must be something in this tiny pocket of sparkly stuffed animal hell that would make a serviceable _Sorry you’re in immeasurable amounts of pain and it might be partly my fault_ gift.  This is gift shop in a _hospital_.  That’s got to be half of the reason people are ever even here.

He needs to be systematic about this so that he can get out of here and back to Ed as soon as possible, so he starts his survey in the back corner.  If nothing else, at least not all of the mystery has quite gone out of the world yet: unbelievably, they’re selling baseball caps emblazoned with the hospital name for twenty-five dollars each.  Nothing says _My health insurance won’t cover half of the procedures they performed while I was unconscious_ quite like an obscenely overpriced commemorative hat, after all.

They have sweatshirts.  They have keychains.  They have a USB stick.  They have sunglasses, and T-shirts, and a coffee table book of photographs of famous hospitals, just in case you miss being laid up in a bland-colored room steeped in layers of prior residents’ maladies, and you want to imagine doing it again somewhere else.

He can hear a tiny clock ticking in his head.  Or maybe that’s the ornamental ones with the hospital logo on the front.

He rakes the hand not clutching the charger cable through his hair and then immediately tries to smooth his hair back down, because that was a mistake.

He has to make a decision here so he can get back to the waiting room.  What is either the single most or the single least ridiculous thing being offered for sale in this establishment?

His eyes land on…

…a blanket.  The logo’s sort of subtle in the corner.  It’s red.  Ed likes red, right?  He feels like he knows that, somehow.

He reaches out and touches it—it’s rolled up to be portable, but it’s a really _nice_ fleece, and for the quality, the price isn’t mortifying.  He checks the tag—blessedly, it’s synthetic.  And it’s just light enough that it would make for a practical layer of warmth without being stifling; it’s the sort of thing Ed could take home and keep and actually be glad to own.

Sale made.

He practically de- and rematerializes in his haste to reach the register, and then he snatches up five KIND bars from the impulse-buy display and slaps them down on top of his prize.  He highly doubts there will be anything edible—to omnivores or animals or anyone—in the cafeteria, so if it comes to drastic measures, this should sustain both of them long enough to survive the night.

“D’you need a bag for ten cents?” the girl asks, making an admirable effort not to get distracted by the lyrics on his shirt.

If Roy ends up running from zombies, he doesn’t want to drop any of those KIND bars.  The damn things are almost four dollars each.

“Please,” he says.

She flicks open one with—naturally—the hospital logo blazoned huge across the front.  He swipes his card again and then tosses his charger cable in with the rest of the loot.

“Thanks,” she says, handing him a receipt.  “Please come again.”

“Thank you,” he says, instead of either _I sincerely hope not_ or _Usually I only hear that from people who are much more naked_.

He takes his bag and makes a break for the E.R. before either of those sentences escapes from his psyche.

Somehow, he navigates the labyrinth of halls, doggedly seeking the green arrows pointing back to the waiting room, without ever winding up at a bricked-off dead end with questionable noises closing in.

He is not sure, however, that he entirely avoided any jaunts through an alternate universe—nobody in the room seems to have moved a muscle since he supposedly left.  The receptionist is still tapping the exact same pen on the exact same clipboard; the middle-aged woman with her hair in curlers is still sitting in the exact same crappy plastic chair, reading the exact same edition of _US Weekly_ ; the sullen-looking teenager with his arm in a homemade sling is still slumped in the exact same position three chairs down—which is going to do terrible things to his spine, if he keeps that up.

Carefully, Roy selects a seat next to an outlet on the wall.  Maybe he should have reprised his previous position closer to the hall where they brought Ed—is it best to preserve the details in what might be a timeless liminal space?  He should have bought one of those clocks at the gift shop after all, just so that he could make track the passage of the individual seconds.  Is he disturbing the sanctity of this place by changing his chair?

More importantly, if this place isn’t governed by the laws of the regular universe, what the hell is going to happen to Ed?  Is he _ever_ going to come back out of there?  How long into purgatorial eternity are the KIND bars going to last?  Roy eyes the candy bowl perched on the receptionist’s desk like a turret of temptation.  High-fructose corn syrup and Red Dye 40 and—

Footsteps from the hall down which Ed disappeared.

Roy sits up straight and tries not to hope _too_ fervently, because there must be a thousand rooms on that side of the endless maze; there must be a thousand patients, and half a thousand doctors—

And, apparently, one _extremely_ foxy male nurse.

Roy’s glad he erred on the side of good posture after all.  He crosses his legs and twists his chest just enough to elongate his torso, watching intently as the orderly he’d like to get _disorderly_ glances down at a clipboard and then up at the room.

His eyes fix on Roy.

Roy’s heart skips.  He lowers his eyelashes demurely, parts his li—

“Are you the ‘douchebag’ waiting for Ed?” the guy asks.

 _Ouch_.

Just for that, Roy’s taking all the good-flavored KIND bars and leaving Ed with the weird ones.

“Probably,” he says, dragging his weary mortal vessel upright and collecting his bag.  He pats for his phone to make sure it’s still tucked securely into his waistband.  “Can I see him?”

“Yup,” the guy says.  “Got the green light.  Come on back.”

Roy inhales slowly, pulling with his diaphragm.  If Ed was dead, and they were heading for the morgue, Foxy, RN wouldn’t look so collected, and he wouldn’t be walking at a leisurely pace that accentuates his rather enviable glutes.

So Ed’s not dead.  And anything else, anything less, any sort of living—anything other than oblivion—they can deal with.

He has to remember that.

He has to breathe from deeper than the heart; has to fill more than just his lungs with the clean air and the openness of possibility—

Which, it has to be said, gets a whole lot harder when the air in question tastes like medicine and sterilized decay.

Foxy, RN turns one more corner and then gestures towards an open doorway just a little ways down the hall.  “Right here, sir.”

“Thank you,” Roy says, and the part of him that wants to add _Your ass is almost as nice as Ed’s_ evaporates as he takes three swift strides forward to step inside.

Ed is—

 _Pale_ ; supine; with deep, dark circles underneath his half-closed eyes; looking so much smaller on the broad, square hospital bed, surrounded by the towering machines with all their readouts and buttons and screens.

It’s so fucking disturbing to see him lying _still_ that Roy makes it all the way to the bedside (and a touch further; it’s only when he collides with the steel bar on the side of it that he realizes how close he’s come) before he notices the cloth-lined plastic straps securing Ed’s wrists down to the structure of the bed.

Ed’s eyes flick towards him—hazy, dull, unfocused.

Roy can’t help it: he’s scared.  He is _scared_ , and when he gets scared, he gets stupid.

When he gets stupid, he says things like “Do you have to pay extra for the bondage?”

Ed—

—laughs.  Dryly, thinly, faintly, like he can’t draw quite enough breath to carry sound, but with an odd ring of… sincerity.

“Put it on my tab,” Ed says, directing the words towards the corner, where—Roy stifles a startle; he hadn’t even glanced over—the doctor from before with the ponytail is standing with her clipboard, watching with an eyebrow raised.  “Nah,” Ed says, apparently to Roy this time.  “It’s so I don’t flip the fuck out and pull out my IV and bleed all over everywhere like the first time.  These guys learn fast.”

“Thank you,” the doctor says.

“Thank _you_ ,” Ed says, and Roy’s never heard that curious floaty quality to his voice before.  Ed’s gaze drifts back up, and he tilts his head, and he—

Smiles.  Narrowly—with a touch of bitterness, but without any strain.

Roy’s never seen that before, either.

“They gave me the good drugs,” Ed says, which simultaneously explains a hell of a lot of it and makes Roy’s heart seize sharply.  “I’d be in here all the fuckin’ time if it didn’t make my head so weird.”  He tugs against the plastic restraint on his left wrist, scowls at it for a long moment, and then turns the scowl on Roy.  He tugs again, for emphasis this time.  “Hey, can you scratch my nose for me?  Fucking itches like a motherfucking son of a bitch.”

“I would have expected your language to be nicer when you’re not in pain,” Roy says, which is better than saying _What?  You—what?  You want me to—touch you?  Voluntarily?  You’re_ asking _?_

“Then you’re a dumbass,” Ed says, but there’s something like— _fondness_ in it.  Is this a dream?  Did Roy fall in one of the thousand featureless hallways and hit his head?  “Are you gonna itch my fuckin’ nose or what?”

On a scale of one to surreal, this is a Q times π to the third.

“Where does it itch?” Roy asks.

Ed stares at him.

“I don’t want to itch the wrong spot,” Roy says, gingerly setting the gift shop bag down on the floor.  “That would make it worse.”

“Are you trying to tell me,” Ed says, “by way of some kind of fucking backwards-ass comments about _surface area_ , that I have a big-ass fucking nose?”

Roy blinks.

“No?” he hazards.

Ed’s blurry-eyed attempt at a glare holds for two more seconds.

Then he drops his head back down on the pillow and laughs like Roy’s never dared to hope to hear.

It feels like his heart’s beating in a huge, cavernous void—so feebly that he’d hardly know it if it wasn’t for the echo.

He turns to the doctor, who is now standing by the foot of the bed examining her paperwork.

Ed is still laughing, although he’s starting to run out of breath.

“I have no idea what just happened,” Roy says.

“We gave him the good drugs,” she says.  “It’s about the only thing we _can_ do.  Usually by the time he comes down, the worst of it has passed.”

 _Usually_ is a cruel fucking word in that sentence.

 _The worst of it_ isn’t much better.

And Roy knows—knows without anyone speaking the requisite cruelties to spell it straight—why Ed doesn’t have his own supply of ‘the good drugs’ at home.  He knows that it’s probably been tempting before—he knows Ed’s probably fantasized about the prospect of _painlessness_ just before his whole world’s gone red-streaked white.

And he knows Ed thinks it’s giving in.

Giving up.

He knows that Ed thinks it would endanger Al—that it would be a betrayal of the one person who’s always had his back.

And he knows Ed wouldn’t risk numbing the only thing he’s ever really taken pride in:

His intellect.

The doctor is looking at Roy, which would be flattering if her expression indicated less colossal disappointment with him as a human specimen.  “Did I hear one of the EMTs say you were his chiropractor?”

“Ah,” Roy says.  “Well.”

She raises an eyebrow so slowly he can almost hear the muscles shifting.  She and Riza must never meet.

“Massage therapist,” Roy says.  “And yoga instructor.”

This time he gets to hear her eyelashes.

“I have a certificate,” he says.

“He doesn’t have to be a doctor,” Ed says.  “’Cause he’s a fucking wizard.”  He wriggles his fingers, pulling again at his plastic confines.  “Hand wizard.  Magic hands.”

That is without a doubt the single nicest thing Ed’s ever said about him.

It may be the single nicest thing Ed’s ever said about _anyone_ , with the obvious exception of Al.

“Hey,” Ed says.  “Show ’im my glamor shots.”

“Your what?” Roy says.

“His X-rays,” the doctor says, in a tone that sounds vaguely resigned.  “I’ll send Nick in, Ed; is that all right?”

“Yeah,” Ed says contentedly.  “Nick is chill.”

Apparently ‘Nick’ is Foxy, RN’s alter ego: he’s waiting in the hall when they leave the room, and the doctor gestures at him to head on into Ed’s room and hold down the fort.  Roy is vaguely disappointed about ‘Nick’; he was hoping for an exciting harlequin hero name like Branton or Xander or Damien or—

“How long has he been seeing you?” the doctor asks.

It is a truly remarkable facet of the language that somehow that is an entirely different question in every possible respect from _How long have you been seeing him?_

“Just about three months now,” Roy says.

He should ask if it’s gotten worse.

He should ask if Ed’s been dragged in here on a gurney more often since Roy started trying to twist him back into shape.

He should ask whether she’s noticed a change; whether Ed’s reported more pain—more of it, or deeper descents.  He should ask whether she has records to chart the patterns; whether she knows what he might be doing _wrong_ —

“Here,” she says, and ushers him into a cozy little office made significantly less cozy and significantly more creepy by the dozen sets of Russian nesting dolls lurking on the bookshelf.

She crosses the room and twists the rod attached to the blinds, shutting out the sunlight so swiftly that he has to fight an instinct to stumble back a step and blink profusely.  She probably already thinks he’s an idiot; might as well minimize the damage as much as he can.

On the wall opposite the bookshelf, there’s a whiteboard and another wide blank space—which she illuminates with a switch, then decorates with a series of X-ray photos swept up from her desk and clipped up over the lighted panel in rapid succession.

That can’t be right.

That can’t be right, because that can’t be _possible_ , but radiology doesn’t _lie_ , and all of these have _E. Elric_ scrawled in the upper left corner next to today’s date—

Even in the moment, he knows it’s melodramatic, but— _time slows down_.  He hears himself inhaling slowly, and his breath feels barbed; it scrapes jaggedly against the walls of his throat all the way up, and then it _sticks_ there in the back of his mouth like a hot-spined bramble.  His heart beats once.  Twice.  Three times.

He’s not a rad tech.  He’s not any kind of damn tech; he’s not an expert in anything, except arguably “holistic medicine and musculature”, if you ask Riza, or “hippie bullshit”, if you’re asking Ed.

But nobody would need an instant of training to see that this is _wrong_.

There are metal rods and bolts pushed through multiple places, bolstering the bone—and even so, visible cracks snake through some of the segments; things are staggeringly obviously _bent_ , warped, twisted out of place—

It looks like the aftermath of a fucking _Saw_ movie.

Roy’s heart beats again, a sharp jolt that jars the breath up out of his throat and pops it out of him in a ragged gasp.

“What did they _do_ to him over there?” he hears the remnants of his voice demanding.

“I tried to ask him that question,” the doctor says, “the first time.  The closest I got was ‘Shit happens’.”

That sounds like Ed.

“As I’d imagine you’ve noticed,” she says, “the nerve damage is probably the worst of it—but of course we can’t get an image of that.  I can’t even guess at the whole story as far as that goes.”

“God,” Roy says.

“Or something,” she says.

Roy looks down and discovers that his hands are, indeed, still attached, even if he can’t quite feel them.  He lifts one and runs it slowly through his hair.

“Do you—” He has to swallow a little knot of… what?  Pride?  Trepidation?  Maybe it’s both.  “Do you have any suggestions?”

She shakes her head.  “Whatever you’re doing certainly doesn’t hurt.”

He blinks.  “Are you—sure?”

She shrugs, flicking the light wall off and stepping back over to the blinds.  “No.  But he’s been here less often, and that must be a good sign.”

Roy swallows again, though it’s easier this time.  “I—guess.”

She turns, raising an eyebrow as she silhouettes herself with the sunlight from the window.  “I suspect having someone who _cares_ about the state of his body and is actively working to improve it goes a long way for him psychologically.  That alone ought to help.”

Roy thinks he might be sick from the sudden swirl of relief in with the guilt and the terror and the dread and the empathetic agony.  “Do you want a free yoga class?  A whole course, if you want—as many sessions as you can come to in a month.  I’ll throw in the mat.”

“Thank you,” she says, cracking a thin smile, “but I’m promised to the pilates club down the street.”

“ _Alas_ ,” he says.  “Well, the offer’s open indefinitely if you change your mind.”

“I’ll remember that,” she says, and then she leads him back out into the hall.  “Are you going to take him home?  I want to keep him under observation for a few more hours, but I should be able to release him by tonight.”

It’ll have to be a cab, unless Riza can pick them up, or maybe Al—

Oh, shit, he hasn’t called Al.

“Sounds great,” he says, which is courteous, albeit not entirely true.  “I’ll figure something out.”

Somehow, over the duration of this horrific little adventure, he earned at least a fragment of her respect.  She holds an arm out to let him into Ed’s room first.

Roy crosses right to the bed and puts both arms around Ed’s body, holding him as tightly as humanly possible without pulling too hard against the restraints.

“The _fuck_?” Ed says, more or less into his collarbone.  “What’s this for?”

“Everything,” Roy says.  “You wouldn’t let me do it if you weren’t high on opioids.”

“You sure it’s me who’s fuckin’ high?” Ed asks.  “I can’t even fuckin’ hug you back.  Let go already.”

Roy obliges.  Easing him back down onto the bed should be… what?  More difficult?  More surreal?  It comes so easy, and it feels so… ordinary.  Natural.  Right.

Falling in love is shit.  It’s shit, and it hurts, and he doesn’t know if he has it in him to weather this again.

“I got you some KIND bars,” he says.

“What kind of bars?” Ed asks.

“No,” Roy says.  “KIND is the brand.”

Ed wrinkles his nose.  “Is it ‘kind’ like ‘generic fuckin’ category’, or ‘kind’ like ‘nice’?”

“No idea,” Roy says.  He bends down to dig in the bag.  “I got blueberry vanilla, cranberry almond, raspberry chia, oats and honey, and dark chocolate cherry cashew.  And I bought you a blanket.”

Ed stares at him as he holds out the bars, trying to fan them so that the flavors show.  “I know you’ve got some fucking fetish about fiber, but I’m not eating a fucking _blanket_.”

“I don’t want you to _eat_ it,” Roy says.  “I just thought it might be nice.”

“Kind-nice?” Ed asks.

“Yes,” Roy says.

“But I’m not cold,” Ed says.  His face does another thing Roy’s never seen before—it starts to _pout_.  “I wish I was, so I could use it, only I’m not.”

“That’s all right,” Roy says.  “You might get cold later.”  He pauses.  Then he leans over slowly and sets the bars down on the little table next to the bed, in between all of the horrific-looking instruments and assorted whatnots.  “Do you want me to call your brother?”

“You have your phone?” Ed asks.  He may be trying to perform a _give it here_ sort of gesture, which mostly just sort of makes his hand look like a beached fish flopping around on the sheet.  “I’ll call him.  No, wait—you call him, and then you hold the phone up to my hear, and I’ll talk to him.  Yeah.”

“Okay,” Roy says slowly, fumbling his phone out again.  “What’s his number?”

Ed rattles it off including the area code almost instantaneously—it’s almost too glib, and Roy can’t help wondering if Ed’s drug-addled brain supplied his favorite pizza place instead.

The line rings.

Well, it’s Ed’s problem now, at least for the next few seconds, before it presumably becomes Roy’s problem again.

Roy bests the urge to hesitate as he reaches carefully inward around the IV drip until he can press the phone screen very gently against Ed’s ear.

“You could put it on speaker,” the doctor says.

Roy startles so hard he drops the phone.

“Ow,” Ed says as it bounces into his lap, and Roy freezes in horror; except that then Ed starts laughing uproariously, which is actually even scarier.  “Just fuckin’ with you,” Ed says.  “I can’t feel a goddamn _thing_.”

Wincing all the while, Roy stretches over to pick up the phone from where it settled facedown on Ed’s thigh.  “Just because you can’t feel it doesn’t mean it isn’t going to bruise.”

“Quit fuckin’ worrying about me,” Ed says.

Roy would say _Try to stop me_ , but there’s some faint sounds emanating from the phone, so he thumbs the speaker button instead.

“ _—leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!  Thank you!_ ” an extremely pleasant, even-more-extremely cheerful voice says.

The phone follows up with an automated beep.

“Hey, Al,” Ed says, and the day of unprecedented firsts continues with Ed’s voice taking on a tone that can only be described as _warm and fuzzy_.  “I’m at the hospital again.  Only it’s okay; it’s all the usual suspects and shit.  And Roy’s here.”

…is it the drugs making Ed forget to contextualize, or has he talked about Roy enough for his brother to recognize the name?

“They already took care of me and shit,” Ed goes on, unperturbed by Roy’s minor existential crisis as always; “and jacked me up on Dilaudid, so I feel _great_ , actually, but—Mustang, what about your dog?”

Roy’s brain staggers before it rights itself.  “What about her?”

“Did you lock her in your fucking office, or what?” Ed asks.  “That’s some fucking animal cruelty shit.”

“Only when I left to look in on you,” Roy says.  “I called Riza when we got here.”

Ed glowers at him for another second before grudgingly conceding: “Okay.”  His voice snaps back to a light, pleasant, completely foreign conversational tone.  “Anyway, I’ll figure out how to get home.  It’s no big deal, so don’t worry about it, _okay_?  Just—do your homework.  Or something.  Actually, you do too much homework; you should watch some TV.  Something really stupid, so you don’t have to think about it at all.  Yeah.  And you can call back at this number if you want to—Roy can afford it after how much I’ve been paying him and shit.  Or text me.  Him.  Whoever.  Okay?  I’ll make sure he takes care of his dog.  Okay.  I hope you’re having a good day, kid.  I love you.  Be safe.  G’bye.”

He looks expectantly up at Roy, who reaches over him again and hits the button to hang up the phone.

“Hey,” Ed says as Roy wedges it carefully into his waistband again.  “Don’t you dare save his number.  I don’t want you bein’ able to call him whenever the fuck you want, or whatever.  Or text him in the middle of the night when he’s trying to sleep and mess up his brain rest before class and shit.  Or—”

“I won’t,” Roy says.  “Scout’s honor.”

“Like they would’ve let you be a scout,” Ed says.  “Those fuckers’d kick you out in a second, ’cause they’d know you were gay.”

This is the most candid Ed has ever been about the very _concept_ of sexuality.

Somehow Roy feels that he’d be taking advantage if he pressed the issue now.

That’s a bad sign.  That a is a _bad_ sign—‘MAYDAY’ spelled out in large red neon letters.  Protective instincts at the cost of his own selfish interests are the beginning of the end.

And the end hurts like hell.

“Figurative scout’s honor,” he says.

Ed scowls at him, which at least looks familiar.  “What the fuck are you bein’ all nice for?”

“I’m always nice,” Roy says.

Ed snorts—loudly, and with audibly moving phlegm.

Adorable.

“When have I ever not been nice to you?” Roy asks.

Ed scowls at him a little more.  “I’m thinkin’.  I bet there’s been times.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” Roy says.  He points to the KIND bars.  “You should probably eat something.”

“I’m _thinking_ ,” Ed says.  “I mean—it’s sort of shitty how you hit on me all the time even though I never make any indication that I’m interested, but you basically do that to everybody.  I was ranting to Al about it this one time, and I think I sorta figured it out; I mean, it’s like—that’s your way of exerting control over social situations, right?  Like, your whole life people’ve been telling you to tone your shit down, but using your charm gives you power, and it comes natural to your personality to turn it up to eleven all the fuckin’ time whether people like it or not.  So that’s not, like… not- _nice_.  It’s just your thing.  It makes you feel like you’ve got a handle on shit.  So I can’t blame you for that.”

Roy is—

—speechless.

He honestly can’t remember the last time that happened.

And his heart is thudding slow and hard and deliberate—like clenching and unclenching a fist.

“ _Are_ you interested?” he says.

That was too much—that wasn’t fair.  Not when the hydromorphone zinging through Ed’s system is leaving him so wide-open; not when he spends the rest of his life fighting so hard to stay safe.

Judging by the momentary gleam of keenness in his eyes, though, Ed’s awake enough to dodge the biggest bullets, and that’s a relief.

“Not the fuckin’ point,” he says.  “The fuckin’ point is you’re weirdly kinda decent, and… I mean, how the hell did you even know to come to my place today, anyway?”

“I had a bad feeling,” Roy says.

Ed rolls his eyes and sinks back into the bed, like the onus of that phrase is simply too much to bear.  “That,” he says, emphatically, “is some hippie _bullshit_.”

That’s more like it.

“My specialty,” Roy says.

“No shit,” Ed says.  “Oh, yeah—you also called me a heathen one time for saying I don’t like ABBA.  That was pretty mean.”

“Sorry,” Roy says.  “I take insults to ABBA a little personally.”

“Fuck,” Ed says.  “That’s… that’s, like, it.  That’s all I got.”  His eyes widen.  “Oh, wait.  You treat your dog like shit.”

“I beg your _pardon_ ,” Roy says.  “I bust my _butt_ getting her the absolute finest in—”

“Meat-free fucked-up vegan bullshit,” Ed says, and the snarl enlivens his face more than anything else in the last half-hour.  “News flash, Mustang: _dogs can’t be vegan_.”

“That’s her choice,” Roy says.

Ed strains against the plastic shackles, grinding his teeth.  “Then let her fucking make it!”

Roy sighs.  They were doing so well.

“I’ll think about it,” he says.

“No, you won’t,” Ed says, “you fuckin’ _liar_.  She’s with Riza right now, right?  Riza’ll feed her.  I’ll have to dognap her next.  Climb your fuckin’ wall.  Break through your window.  Steal your fuckin’ dog.”

A little lightbulb illuminates in Roy’s brain.  He whirls around and gestures to get the doctor’s attention.  “You heard that, right?  If Blanche goes missing, you _heard_ him conf—”

Another, larger lightbulb flickers on.

“Oh, God,” he says.  “Are there things you need to do?  Am I in the way?  I’m sorry, I j—”

“Are you kidding?” the doctor says.  She doesn’t look annoyed—she’s leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded across her chest.  “My ex hacked into my Netflix account and changed the password, so I haven’t been able to watch any of my soaps in weeks.  This is making up a _lot_ of the deficit.”

“Oh,” Roy says.  “Well.  We accept tips.”

“Especially in the form of morphine derivatives,” Ed says.

“And quinoa,” Roy says.

“Fuck your quinoa,” Ed says.

“Speaking of which,” Roy says, gathering up the KIND bar collection again, “you need to eat one of these.”

“Jesus,” Ed says.  “Why are you so fucking intent on taking care of me?”

“Because I want to,” Roy says.  “You deserve to be happy, and I want to help make that happen, if I can.  At the very least, in whatever way I’m able, I want to try to minimize your pain.”

Ed stares at him.

Roy holds out the KIND bars.

“The cherry one,” Ed says.  “What the actual fuck, Roy?”

Roy lays the others back down on the table and starts undoing the wrapper.  They should really make their packaging biodegradable.  “What do you mean?”

“All that shit you just said,” Ed says.  “What the _fuck_?”

“I don’t do this _just_ because I look so mind-blowingly hot in yoga pants,” Roy says.  “Helping people feel better makes _me_ happy.  And it’s important.  It matters.  And I want you to feel like your pain matters, too, because it does.”

Ed returns to the venerable pastime of staring.

“You should eat this,” Roy says, brandishing the bar.

“I can’t,” Ed says, wriggling the fingers of his pinioned hands.

Roy tries to consider his options, which is difficult when his brain just went aggressively blank.  “Oh.  Right.”

“Feed it to him,” the doctor says.  “I—mean.”  She coughs into her closed fist.  “Ed, if I let you use your left hand, will you promise me you won’t try to get the needle out?”

“Yeah,” he says.  “I’m too fuckin’ tired to do the contortionist shit anyway.”

“All right,” she says.  “Sounds like a deal.”  She crosses over, and Roy steps out of the way so that she can undo one of the cuffs.  “I’m counting on you,” she says, eyeing him, “to keep him safe from himself.”

He’s not sure whether she means right now, or all the time, or possibly both.

“I’ll try,” he says.

She undoes the snaps, and Ed lifts his arm up, grimacing as he circles his wrist.  “Thanks, Doc.”

“Don’t thank me until the drugs wear off,” she says.  “Call button’s behind you, or just have him—” She jerks her thumb at Roy.  “—run screaming down the hall until somebody pays attention.”

“He probably runs pretty fast,” Ed says.  “He could get a long way.”

“Thank you?” Roy says.

“Sure,” Ed says.

“Please don’t destroy anything,” the doctor says.  “I’ll check back in a couple of hours and let you know when I can release you, all right?”

With that, she sweeps out.

Roy turns the edges of the wrapper down to maximize the edible surface area and hands Ed the KIND bar.

“Thanks,” Ed says.  “I’m probably hungry, but it’s like… you get on this shit, and you don’t feel jack-fucking- _shit_.  It’s fuckin’ great.”  He takes more of a mouthful than a bite, and then he continues speaking through its contents.  “C’n understand how people get addicted to this shit.”

“Yeah,” Roy says softly.  “I can, too.”

Ed chews thoughtfully for a moment, then takes an even bigger bite, then chews that.

“Jeff’f Chriff,” he says.  He swallows.  “Jesus Christ,” he says.  He raises his arm far enough to rub at the join of his mandible with the back of his wrist.  The motion makes the tube funneling liquid into his bloodstream swing, and he flinches at the tug of it before looking intently away.  “This organic-as-fuck shit’s hard on the jaw.”

“Can be,” Roy says.  “They go a little overboard with these trying to make them portable, I think.”

Ed works his jaw for another moment.  “Eh.  Yeah.  S’good practice for blow jobs, though, I guess.”

Roy opens his mouth.

Roy shuts his mouth.

Roy sidesteps over to a plastic chair loitering by the wall, drags it over, sits down, and crosses his legs.

“Right,” he says.

Ed gazes in great solemnity at the remainder of his bar.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” he says, thoughtfully.

“I’m going to attribute it to the drugs,” Roy says.

Ed slants a smile at him.  “If you keep on bein’ all fuckin’ nice and shit, I’m gonna expect it all the time.”

Roy shrugs.

And crosses his legs a little tighter.

There aren’t many downsides to yoga pants, but on the rare occasions that you _don’t_ want the whole world to know how generously endowed you are, they can be a bit inconvenient.

  


* * *

  


After a brief tussle with the IV (Roy and the IV win, although Roy, for one, is well-aware that they wouldn’t have stood a chance if Ed had had both hands and sound reflexes; he’s not sure the IV appreciates their fortune) and another KIND bar, Ed dozes off with the still-rolled blanket clutched to his chest like a teddy bear.

Roy scoots his chair two inches closer—just in case—and then curls up with his phone to play a round or two of a very soothing muted-color-matching game and let the frenetic energy of this day start flowing out of him.

It’s difficult to apply any concrete units of measurement to universal life force and its temperature-colors, but Roy has barely even brushed the edges of his zen when a rather tall, extremely attractive boy with wheat-colored hair and olive-tinted brown eyes strides into the room.

“Hi,” he says, keeping his voice low enough that Ed doesn’t even stir.  “I got the message.  It’s nice to meet you after several months of him alternately singing your praises and damning you to ‘hippie hell’.”

The gaping-uncertainty thing is _not_ a good look on Roy, but he just can’t seem to stop today.  “…he alternates?”

The boy—Al of course—gives him a small, tight smile.  “Oh, darn, I’ve said too much.”  He gestures towards the bed.  “How bad was it?”

“Bad,” Roy says.  “How bad is it normally?”

“Bad,” Al says.

Al selects a plastic torture-chair from the cluster still huddled by the door, carries it over, and sets it down as quietly as possible next to Roy’s.  He sits.

“I’m glad you were there,” Al says.  “He may not say it in so many words, but he was, too.”

“He’s been much more effusive today,” Roy says.  “After the drugs, anyway.”

“I tricked him into talking about quantum physics the first time we were here,” Al says.  “He rambled for half an hour straight and then immediately fell asleep.”

“Not too straight, I hope,” Roy says.

…oh.

“That was supposed to stay in my head,” he says.

Al’s smile broadens just enough for a sliver of teeth to show.  “Don’t worry.  Like I said, he talks about you a lot.”

“Talks or complains?” Roy asks, because he’s a glutton for punishment.

“Complains,” Al says mildly.  “But complaining is a sign that he cares about someone; people who don’t matter to him don’t merit the time.”

Roy looks at him for a long moment.

“Do you like yoga?” he asks.

Al blinks.  “I’m… not sure.  Why?”

“Free course,” he says.  “On me.  Unlimited sessions for the next month.”

Al smiles, warmly this time, as he gets it.

“No, thank you,” he says.  He pauses.  “But I will take one of those KIND bars.”

Roy moves to pass him the whole bundle to choose from.  “Evidently they’re good practice for blow jobs.”

Al freezes with his hand outstretched.  “I—beg your pardon?”

Somewhat hastily, it has to be admitted, Roy jerks his head towards Ed.  “He said it.”

“They really did give him the good drugs,” Al says.  “Ooh, blueberry vanilla.  Thanks.”

And that’s the thing he must, must _always_ , remember:

The universe is trying to be KIND.


End file.
